Esther Lay is a poet, priest, and classical singer. She is a 2025 Forward Prize nominee for “The Performance”, which won the East Riding Festival of Words Poetry Competition in 2025. She is also the winner of the 2024 Write By The Sea Poetry Prize. In 2025 she placed second (jointly with herself, for two poems) in the Write Out Loud Poetry Competition, judged by Neil Astley, editor of Bloodaxe Books, and was shortlisted for the Plaza Prizes, judged by Natalie Diaz, the Four Faced Liar Poetry Prize, New Writers Poetry Competition, Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year, Ironbridge Poetry Competition (with three poems), and the Winchester Poetry Prize, judged by Fiona Benson. In 2024 she placed third in Trio International, and both 4th and 6th in the Plaza Prizes. She has been shortlisted three times for the Bridport Prize and longlisted for the Fish Prize and Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year. She has recent work in The Waxed Lemon, The Ghost Furniture Catalogue, Grain Magazine, the Broken Spine Spring 2025 Anthology, Thimble Literary Magazine, Rust & Moth,Alchemy Spoon, and14 Magazine, and forthcoming work in The Four Faced Liar and Passionfruit Review. She runs monthly poetry workshops in Wootton by Woodstock, where she is the parish priest.
Esther Lay was born in California, brought up in Beijing, Singapore, and Sydney, and claims a hometown in Olney, Illinois. She read philosophy and theology at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and trained as a classical singer at the Royal Academy of Music in London. After a distinguished ten-year career as a concert soloist specialising in baroque repertoire (under the name Esther Brazil), she trained for priesthood at Ripon College Cuddesdon, where she began writing poetry in 2020, and served her curacy at St Mary Magdalen, Oxford, from 2021-2024, where she was the first woman to hold the post. She is now Rector of Wootton, in West Oxfordshire, where she lives with her husband Ben, who is a serving officer in the Royal Navy, and their two small children.
Reviews
On the poems “Jidan” and “Witness”, awarded joint second in Write Out Loud 2025:
“The author of two very different poems turned out to be the same poet, Esther Lay. In ‘Jidan’, the mixed-race speaker recalls a cruel childhood nickname (Jidan, Chinese for chicken egg, ‘white on the outside, yellow on the inside’) and turns it on its head, the image becoming symbolic of someone who will always protest, who won’t conform, who is proud to be different, to be herself. Her other poem ‘Witness’ takes the first four words of WS Merwin’s four-line poem ‘Witness’ (I want to tell …’) – an imagined future memory of life after climate change recalling the world as it had been – and takes off into an evocation of another life-changing but now vanished time, that of a mother finding herself in another time zone, that of living a 24-hour day with newborn babies. Both poems are sensually rich, every phrase or image on heightened alert to the five senses: sight, smell, hearing/sound (echoes!), taste and touch.”
– Neil Astley, Bloodaxe Books
On “Self-Portrait as Water”, shortlisted in the Plaza Prizes 2025:
“The poem begins tongue-in-cheek, with a flicker of humor, but then finds its curiosity and wonder—water, and how it is immense and mysterious and yet able to be cupped in our hands. The poem rushes in and out of the language of sea and water, creating currents of awe through imagery. There are fathoms of self yet to be unlocked in the big waters of this poem.”
– Natalie Diaz
Esther Lay 
